Where to start with Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations begins in ordinary speech and lets the later Wittgenstein dismantle the picture of language he once built.
The numbered propositions and the line about silence have made Wittgenstein seem sealed; you want to watch him work through concrete examples.
Starting at the Tractatus, picking up the picture theory of language and the famous final lines, and concluding that Wittgenstein is a mystical positivist with a numbered system. The late Wittgenstein spent his life refusing that picture; reading the early book first risks fixing him in the position he was working hardest to abandon. Or the inverse failure: reading him through commentaries and never sitting with the actual prose, which is one of the strangest and most patient texts in twentieth-century philosophy.
Books in order
- Philosophical Investigations — Read it slowly, a few remarks at a time. Do not try to systematise; the form is the argument. The famous passages — the beetle in the box, the duck-rabbit, the rule-following considerations, the private language argument — only land if you have lived patiently with the unflashy remarks around them. Read part one in order; part two can be sampled later.
- On Certainty — Wittgenstein's last notebooks, written in the months before his death. Six hundred and seventy-six short remarks on knowledge, doubt, and the kinds of things we cannot meaningfully be wrong about. Read them as the most distilled version of the late procedure — short enough to live with, severe enough to teach you how the Investigations were built.
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — The early book — seven numbered propositions, a picture theory of meaning, and a famous mystical close. Read it last, as the object the late Wittgenstein spent his life arguing against. In this order, the Tractatus's brilliance is intact and its limits are audible; in the reverse order, the limits silently become the whole picture of him.
Further reading
- Culture and Value — Wittgenstein's marginalia — short personal remarks on religion, music, Shakespeare, the temperament of the age. Read it after the philosophical books; the same procedure is at work on a reduced scale, and the entries are useful for hearing the writer behind the system.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius — Ray Monk's biography — the standard life, lucid on both the philosophy and the man. Read it once you already trust the prose; biographies of philosophers are dangerous as openers because they substitute the life for the work, but as a companion to the work Monk's book is unmatched.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir — Norman Malcolm's memoir — short, affectionate, useful. Wittgenstein's friend writing about Wittgenstein the man. Read it after Monk; the difference between a memoir and a biography is part of what reading them in this order shows.